How can I split out individual column values from each line in a text file?

Question

I have lines in an ASCII text file that I need to parse. The columns are separated by a variable number of spaces, for instance:

column1 column2     column3

How would i split this line to return an array of only the values?

thanks

Answer 1

String testvar = "Some   Data    separated  by     whitespace";
String[] vals = testvar.split("\\s+");

\s means a whitespace character, the + means 1 or more. .split() splits a string into parts divided by the specified delimiter (in this case 1 or more whitespace characters).

Answer 2

sed 's/  */\n/g' < input

Two spaces there btw.

Answer 3

Check the StringTokenizer class.